According to a new paper published Monday in the journal PNAS, the international team of scientists suggests that there are 20.4 billion ants roaming our planet right now. That’s 20,000,000,000,000,000 of these six-legged insects that you catch pollinating plants, scatter seeds like little gardeners and drool over a toasted bagel. “We further estimate that the world’s ants collectively account for about 12 megatons of dry carbon,” said Wong, an ecologist at the University of Western Australia’s School of Biological Sciences. “Impressively, this exceeds the biomass of all the world’s wild birds and mammals combined.” To put this staggering amount into perspective, multiply the estimate of ant biomass by five. The number you get is almost equal to the entire human biomass on Earth — and that may be a conservative estimate. Each of the 489 global studies was quite thorough — using tens of hundreds of trapping tactics, such as catching escaped ants in small plastic grooves and gently shaking leaves to find out how many take refuge in crisp homes. But as with most research efforts, caveats remained. The sampling sites, Wong explains, were unevenly distributed across geographic regions, for example, and the vast majority were collected from the soil layer. “We have very little information about the number of ants in the trees or in the ground,” he said. “That means our findings are somewhat incomplete.”
Why worry about counting ants?
Despite their smaller size, ants have a lot of strength.
In addition to opening seeds in the ground for dinner and plants accidentally blooming from their remains, this trash is integral to maintaining the delicate balance of our ecosystem. They are prey of larger animals, predators of many others, soil stirrers and scavengers, to name just a few of their distinctions. So considering the sheer volume of them gracing the Earth, it’s a pretty big deal. “This sheer volume of ants on Earth greatly underscores their ecological value, as ants can punch above their weight in providing essential ecological functions,” Wong said.
But when it comes to counting specific ants, as Wong did, there is an urgency that stems from the rate at which our climate is changing. Scientists need to quantify how many ants, as well as other animals and insects, exist on Earth because the climate crisis — a threat exacerbated by human activity — is causing global temperatures to rise and therefore putting these organisms at risk of extinction .
We need people to rigorously and repeatedly survey and describe the ecological communities of different habitats before they are lost.
Mark Wong, biologist
“We need people to rigorously and repeatedly describe the ecological communities of different habitats before they are lost,” Wong said, noting that the team’s recent work provides an important baseline for ant populations to know how their communities may change. of insects. alongside a warming climate.
A worst case scenario of not counting our fellow Earth friends is sometimes called the “dark extinction” or anonymous extinction. It is simply the concern that many species may disappear under the radar as the climate crisis worsens due to factors such as habitat loss or habitability.
These animals on the road to extinction may not even be documented, let alone studied in detail.
In this regard, the group’s PNAS study opens with a fitting quote from American biologist and ant expert Edward O. Wilson: “Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them”.
Going forward, that’s why Wong believes it’s important to survey ant populations regularly, even speeding up the process by outsourcing it to anyone who can and wants to participate. “Things like counting ants,” he said, “taking pictures of insects they encounter in their yard and observing the interesting things plants and animals do can go a long way.
“It would be great if we had — as the eminent ant biologist EO Wilson once suggested — just ‘more boots on the ground’.”
